2y ago

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

www.pcgamer.com

Citing "lack of transparency from Fandom [...] loss of features [...] and toxic company culture."

Gaming @beehaw.org

alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org

2y ago

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

www.pcgamer.com /official-minecraft-wiki-editors-so-furious-at-fandoms-degraded-functionality-and-popups-theyre-overwhelmingly-voting-to-leave-the-site/

Games @lemmy.world

simple @lemmy.world

2y ago

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

www.pcgamer.com /official-minecraft-wiki-editors-so-furious-at-fandoms-degraded-functionality-and-popups-theyre-overwhelmingly-voting-to-leave-the-site/

Games @sh.itjust.works

simple @lemmy.world

2y ago

Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site

www.pcgamer.com /official-minecraft-wiki-editors-so-furious-at-fandoms-degraded-functionality-and-popups-theyre-overwhelmingly-voting-to-leave-the-site/

28 comments

Yes, finally! Ever since the minecraft wiki moved away from gamepedia, it's been absolutely terrible. I avoid Fandom at all costs.
- Fandom acquired Gamepedia a few years ago.
  This was a big thing with the WoWwiki, they were on Fandom with WoWwiki and moved to Gamepedia with WoWpedia to get away from Fandom, and then Gamepedia got bought out so they ended up where they started.
  Seems now the only options are Fandom, Fextralife or self-hosted.
  
  Self hosting is probably a good idea for something as ubiquitous as Minecraft. The problem is that Fandom completely dominates the google search results game. It's a real problem when looking up information on games since fandom is almost always the first result and always has pretty crappy information. (I.E. look up any street fighter character for a specific game. Fandom shows up first, but lacks basic move information, strategies or proscons. You generallywant SRK wiki or dustloop for anime games in reality, but google is unable to determine the actual quality of a given source it seems.)
I’m always baffled when I see people post links to the Fandom site for Skyrim rather than UESP my beloved. Community-run, for passion and not for profit. The internet of yore, today.
Simpler “digital newspaper”-type interfaces beat all the video-auto playing nonsense any day of the week. Fandom’s interfaces are genuinely baffling to use, who approved all of this visual cramming of information I didn’t ask for? You know I won’t randomly start enjoying any of it right?
Fandom’s Steam key store, Fanatical (used to be called Bundle Stars), is still pretty good, although I wish I didn’t feel like spending money there directly funds those autoplaying cancer videos.
Fandom is unusable without a ad blocker and javascript blocker, and is barely usable with
Why not do what the dwarf fortress wiki did, it looks just like wikipedia.
- And it's free too. Why people try to reinvent the wiki is beyond me.
  
  Don’t all these wiki sites use MediaWiki, including Wikipedia?
- Fandom also uses Mediawiki, like Wikipedia.
Fandom has been complete and utter shit for years now.
Better late than never though.
Satisfactory moved its wiki away from Fandom as well. They use wiki.gg now, which seems a lot more like gamepedia used to be before the fandom enshittification.
- Ark did the same thing. The only issue I have with it is the various explorer/spawn/resource map pages for each one. Something about them just makes firefox start lagging after a bit
PoE moved away from fandom and created their own fan based site, and it's so much better now
They don't mention this, but Minecraft isn't the first to abandon the shitty fandom.com platform. Zelda wiki left Fandom last fall, the Star Trek Online wiki jumped ship in February (sorry for the Reddit link, there's no article on STO), and the Fallout wiki left too. Evidently there are more game wikis that got fed up with Fandom and set up shop somewhere else, but there's no press on that, at least that I could find. It's definitely part of a trend, and people need to aware of that.
Edit: others have commented about the exodus of other game wikis. Yep, definitely a trend that isn't being reported
First they left Reddit; now they're leaving Fandom. Do they believe they're too big to be overshadowed by Google algorithms?
- Minecraft? It probably is.
- Wikis don't really need too much SEO though. If there's one good wiki, chances are it'll pop up on the first page somewhere when you google "minecraft [game-specific term]". And from then on you know to use that wiki, and just go directly to their website instead of googling.
  Terraria's wiki has been running independently of Famdom for a while now, so has Paradox's, Guild Wars 2's, etc etc.
Don't understand why people view the web without adblockers in 2023. Fandom websites, with adblockers, look and function perfectly fine.
Good. Any wiki dumping Fandom is worth commending.
They could try Miraheze. It’s a small nonprofit that doesn’t put any ads on the site.
- Has to be some way of paying the bills too, though.
Slightly rewriting thousands of pages of text to avoid being buried by Google sounds like a good job for ChatGPT.
Algorithms thwarting other algorithms... smells like justice.
The Fandom buyout of D&D Beyond was the beginning of the end for them. Thankfully most of the talent looks like it went to the same place and got to start over with some lessons learned.

28 comments